Booher: Is MSU a basketball school or not?

Kary BOOHER Kary Booher. Nathan Papes/News-Leader

Notice last week how university president Clif Smart one day re-affirms that Missouri State is a basketball school, and then the next plows full-steam ahead with football?

Let's make this simple: A roughly $450,000 loss in season tickets is grounds for firing the women's basketball coach. But it's OK for an eyesore of a football program to be a $1.4 million boondoggle.

That's the mixed signal Smart sent with Nyla Milleson's firing from the tradition-rich Lady Bears on Monday, then his insistence the next day that Missouri State find a way to pay for upgrades to the football stadium, for a team that's lost 49 of its past 77 games and hasn't sniffed the playoffs in 22 years.

So this was my question to Smart: At what point do you really make Missouri State a true basketball school?

Here it is the opening weekend of the NCAA Tournament, and 13 of the 64 entrants don't field football teams, including longtime conference rivals Wichita State and Creighton and a No. 1 seed in Gonzaga. And they seem to be doing just fine.

For 10 minutes, Smart tried to make his case for football, beginning with this admission: Said Smart, "We know that we are never going to break even playing football."

He later added, "We could not win a game for the next 10 years and I would still not terminate football. ? And you may think that's crazy."

Naturally, I couldn't help but laugh. Nothing like seeing someone gamble with house money.

To Smart, many programs in Missouri State's level of football, the Football Championship Subdivision, don't make money, even the powerhouses.

"You have to decide that football is valuable because of what it brings to the table. If you're successful, you've got 16,000 to 17,000 people on a Saturday on campus. And we've had those crowds as late as a year before last," Smart said moments earlier.

"And when you have 12,000; 15,000, 17,000 people on campus, it's the event that brings the most people to campus - more than concerts, more than a convocation, more than graduation, more than basketball games," Smart said. "Football has the potential, if you do it right, to be the biggest way that you generate spirit and connection to the university."

Smart's passion is to be appreciated. All university presidents want to make their mark.

Oh, and I did check the numbers. Attendance for four games in 2011 were as follows: 14,800; 10,800; 12,312 and 5,278. So you can see why he wants to charge ahead.

However, as I told Smart, it's a stretch to think of 17,000 at Plaster Sports Complex. Would love to see it. Coach Terry Allen is likeable. And one of the best things in life is a packed house on a college campus on Saturday afternoon.

But Smart is dreaming.

That's why Missouri State's efforts to upgrade the football stadium are puzzling. Why not wait to see what happens?

To me, the counter argument is that, if next football season is yet another dud, maybe Missouri State should put more financial resources into the basketball teams.

Yes, an additional sport or two would have to be added to accommodate Title IX requirements.

But beef up the one sport that really galvanizes a community, one that thinks of itself as a basketball town.

But it would be disappointing if Missouri State, hamstrung money-wise because football is hogging $1.4 million of the budget, tries to reach under the seat cushions for any loose change but still comes up short in hiring a coach Bears fans really, really want.

After all, on the day when it was announced that Milleson was fired, Smart all but said it himself that Missouri State has long been a basketball school.

Milleson won the conference last year and graduated Casey Garrison, the program's all-time second-leading scorer, but gets canned a year later over both declining season tickets and program perception.

But in football?

"In football, we didn't have the attendance or season-ticket issue. We lost a critical piece of the football team before the season started last year," Smart said, publicly giving Allen a pass for the dismissal in May 2012 of accused-troublesome quarterback Trevor Wooden.

"We haven't supported football historically. We have some of the poorest facilities in the league. We pay our coach at the bottom of the salary," Smart told me. "Anything we get out of football we're overachieving. Now, we want to change that."

It can be argued that comparing the Lady Bears and football is like comparing apples to oranges.